The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1944: Amazing Adventures #31, July 1975

For information on stopping the spread of COVID-19, and on what to do if you are quarantined, have a look at the World Health Organization site.

I feel like if you're a comics fan and you don't know the art of P. Craig Russell, then you need to do yourself a favour and educate yourself. Today's featured creator is one of the most dynamic and innovative comics artists out there. No one lays out a page like Mr. Russell, and no one tells a story in the way he can. And, according to his wiki entry, he was the first comics creator to openly come out as gay. I can't access the article in which this is stated, but I'll give the wiki the benefit of the doubt.

I'll say this: even if you didn't know he was gay, you'd have an inkling after reading this comic. There's so much more attention lavished on the male bodies than on the female ones here. That's not to say that the women aren't present in the story, just that the men are prominent in the story. This is an early series for Mr. Russell, and as he moves through the 80s and 90s I find his work becomes slightly more stylized, but also more confident. His adaptation of Wagner's entire Ring cycle is a beauty to behold, though it's sometimes a bit of a slog. Maybe I'm just not an opera fan.

While there isn't any explicit homosexuality in this comic, given it's a mainstream comic from teh mid-70s, there is a remarkable amount of homosociality. Mr. Russell's art illustrates the story and words of Don McGregor, whose work I've spoken highly of in the past. Mr. McGregor, to me, demonstrates an interesting precursor to ally-ship in a very specific forum. His comics celebrate diversity in ways that I don't think any other comics were at the time. Both of these creators really bear some attention, more than they have been given, I think.

One other thing came of my reading this comic - I think I'm going to have to track down all the issues. I've only ever read the entirety of the Killraven saga in the Marvel Essential series, which reprints in black and white. While you still get the story, it's hard to really appreciate the beauty of the setting and the characters without some colour. That's my feeling, anyway. So Amazing Adventures joins the original run of Man-Thing on my list of old comics that I just need to get.

More to follow.

 Further Reading and Related Posts

I've read a few other bits of Mr. Russell's work in the project. He always brings a remarkable beauty to whatever publication he's involved in. 

And Don McGregor is really a great writer. I think he's worth checking out.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1938: Sabre #3, December 1982

For information on stopping the spread of COVID-19, and on what to do if you are quarantined, have a look at the World Health Organization site.

 

 I've not read the seminal Sabre graphic novel, ostensibly the first such publication in the modern era, so I did a bit of background reading. It didn't help much, as I didn't want to spoil too much for myself, so I'm not exactly sure how Sabre and his pals have ended up in captivity by the totalitarian regime that has taken over the U.S.

Isn't it amazing how many pieces of fiction, from throughout the last hundred years or so, have warned of just this thing?

Today's featured creator, Billy Graham, has been dead longer than my kid has been alive. It's not a shocking thing, by any means, but it does give a nice sense, for me at least, of the historicity that is involved in considering the contributions of Black artists to the comics medium. As with many artists in the 70s, Mr. Graham cut his teeth on Warren's black and white magazines, illustrating a number of pieces in the original run of Vampirella. I've got a collection of the first 12 issues on my shelf, and I'll have to remember that Mr. Graham is in there when I get around to reading it. His work in this issue of Sabre is fucking brilliant. From a dream narrative to a government office to a dank dungeon, every page captures the atmosphere that one would expect to find in such a setting, and the characters react in very believable ways to their situations. I've a couple more issues of this series in the collection, and I really ought to get off my butt and get the rest of the series. It's really good.

I also would like to just take a moment to mention Don McGregor. I've been intrigued by his comics for a while, and he's one of the names to come from 70s Marvel that, along with my fave Steve Gerber, is hailed as a deft and original comics writer. But Mr. McGregor, through his comics, is also demonstrating something that I think is really important, especially given the time in which a lot of his work was published: he's a good ally. Just in this series, we have a Black leading character, a homosexual couple, and, according to sources, the first gay kiss in mainstream comics. Beats out Apollo and the Midnighter by a few decades. This comic is dedicated to Mr. McGregor's son, with the epigraph reading, in part, "with the hope that the fight for dignity and honor will be easier in the future." Given the characters populating this series, the ideas of dignity and honour carry slightly more weight than they might in a comic featuring a team of monochromatic superheroes. Have a look at Mr. McGregor's output over the course of his career, and I think you'll see that this is someone who pushed for diversity and representation in his work right from the very beginning, and really we shold be considering him an important role model for the comics community.

More to follow.

Further Reading and Related Posts

I don't have any other Billy Graham-related articles on the blog, but here's a couple more about Don McGregor's work. His Killraven is totally worth checking out.

And having mentioned the gay couple in Sabre, I'll always take an opportunity to talk about queerness in comics.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1279: Zorro #0, November 1993

It's like a 19th century version of Deliverance.

There was a brief time when I thought I might try to track down all of Don McGregor's stuff, around the same time I was really discovering Steve Gerber's work. I did do some work in finding his works, but they didn't speak to me the same way Mr. Gerber's did. In some cases it was genre, in others simply that I'm not a huge fan of his chosen way of telling comics stories. The predominance of caption boxes is just not my thing. I'm more interested in elucidation through context, rather than exposition. Mr. McGregor sees comics a bit differently.

This is a very bloody comic. There's a poor beaver that spends its entire existence in the story gnawing its leg off to escape a trap. And Zorro has to take out a giant, crazed mountain man.

Now that I've written it, perhaps Zorro wandered into Alberta.

More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 589: Power Man #31, May 1976

I have to say that one of the most interesting things about this comic is the coming next month box which advertises a story called "The Fire This Time," an obvious shout out to James Baldwin's seminal piece of protest literature, The Fire Next Time. I feel like I have to go back to my Baldwin before reading the next issue, just to see how the two connect.

What this does is solidify a position I've been coming to personally, though perhaps a bit late given the other writings on 70s Marvel that I've come across, that there was something rather profound going on with these writers in the Marvel bullpen. Many of the artists on Marvel properties through the 70s gained a good deal of stardom - George Perez, just to name one, continues to be a force in the industry, and has influenced countless new artists. But the writers, though their names are known, carry nowhere near as much weight as the British Invasion writers of the 80s and 90s, or the American writers who followed in their wake.

This article highlights four writers that you should pay attention to: Doug Moench, Steve Englehart, Don McGregor, and Steve Gerber. I've already waxed lyrical about Gerber numerous times on this blog, and I truly believe he's one of the great writers of American literature, let alone comics. But the other three are every bit as good, and were experimenting with the medium every bit as much, at the time. McGregor (who's our writer for today) did a spectacular run on the War of the Worlds sequel comic "Killraven, Warrior of the Worlds" in Amazing Adventures. Not only does this spiritual successor to Wells tell a remarkable post-apocalypse science fiction story, but it also features some early work by luminary P. Craig Russell. You could go much farther wrong than picking it up.

But what about today's comic? Well, if finishes off the story line of the Roach and the Piranha, and Cage saves the city from being exposed to a carcinogenic chemical that would have turned lung cancer into an epidemic. He also defeats the toothy antagonist in a battle alluded to on the cover, but nowhere near as dire as the cover makes it look.

Covers.

Onward.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 588: Power Man #30, April 1976

Seriously, what's with the tiara?

I get that superheroes need costumes, but for a character conceived as a gritty, urban vigilante, a silver (or gold, depending on the colourist) tiara seems a trifle ostentatious.

After reading his Killraven, I thought I had discovered another author to obsess over in Don McGregor. I started tracking down his work. He'd done an acclaimed couple of runs on the Black Panther, which were (and still are) notoriously difficult to find, but his Power Man stuff presented itself almost in full to me one day in the basement of Big B Comics in Hamilton. So I bought them.

They, really, are pretty much what you'd expect. Over the top dialogue, over the top villains, over the top hero. Sweet Christmas, indeed. I thought that since the new Luke Cage series had dropped over on Netflix that I would have a peek into the character's past. It's...well, I'm coming in part way through a story (McGregor's first issue, #28, is absent from the collection), so there's that. And I'd forgotten that McGregor loves his prose. While I'm all about experimentation with the form, and while the amount of prose he drops in Killraven really adds to the strange beauty of the setting, I'm not sure it's appropriate in a comic like Power Man. This is supposed to be brutal and messy, and the attempt to describe sewage smells through fairly large caption boxes seems a bit...well, it seems a bit 70s, if that makes any sense.

Anyway, I still like McGregor's stuff, but sometimes I think that his style needs to be tempered by the genre or story within which he's working. I'm still intrigued to read his Black Panther, but I think I'll have to track down a trade or something, assuming one has been published.

A bit more Power Man tomorrow, I think. I really need to find out what happens with the deadly gas that's going to destroy EVERY LIVING THING IN NEW YORK!!!!

Onward.